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Wednesday, 9 May 2012

And the winner is... BrewDog

Ah, BrewDog. In the eyes of some, the darling of the UK craft beer scene and in the eyes of others, the kings of shameless self promotion and controversy. They need little encouragement to shout about their cause, so when they got wind of drinks industry behemoth Diageo intervening so they didn't win an award, their PR agency (Manifest) were engaged to stir up a storm, and it proved to be the eye of a perfect storm of activity on twitter.

This post isn't about the story itself. You can read BrewDog's take on that here. I'm not aware of any response from Diageo but will link to that here too if one becomes available (UPDATE: Diageo have issued an official statement. Pete Brown also commented on it here). This post is about the reach of the hashtag that surrounded that storm, #andthewinnerisnot. In previous posts, I've looked at the twitter activity driven by a night of imperial stouts (#impoff) and the online launch of Durham Brewery's White Stout (#whitestout).

Perhaps it was the David versus Goliath nature of it or perhaps it was a slow news day, the facts however are that the hashtag became the fourth highest trend on twitter within an hour and for a short while was the number one trend (paid-for promoted trends aside) in the UK.

4th 'most trending' globally at 14:45

Given the sheer volume of tweets the two events covered previously drove, I was fascinated to see just how many tweets a global trend takes, over what period and the type of activity needed to achieve this. The below analysis was completed using a combination of the archivist, excel and tweetreach and covers the period between the first tweet at 13:37 and 14:55 (UK time) on Wednesday 9th May 2012. First of all, let's look at the number of tweets per minute during that period:

So it took some time for the volume to ramp up but activity peaked at 14:52 at 52 tweets per minute, or just about one a second. A total of 1200 tweets containing the hashtag were sent in this period. Interestingly, by then the tweets covered a wide range of subjects (see below) so the hashtag had become diluted from the original intent. Perhaps this is the general, re-useable nature of it providing a road in for the One Direction and Bieber crowd.

Tweetreach pulled in 1079 tweets from 899 unique contributors. The below graphic also shows the makeup of these (tweets, re-tweets and @replies):

So what was the reach like? Mind blowing compared to the previous analysis. The numbers of 'impressions' (users who saw tweets, and how many) is shown below:

The reach of this hashtag was phenomenal in such a short space of time. This is an early analysis and I suspect the number at time of posting has extended beyond half a million accounts:

Here's a word cloud showing the most commonly used words used in those tweets:

BrewDog may not have won an award but Diageo ironically gave them much more than that through their actions. The chance to trend globally on twitter and no doubt some favourable press coverage to follow means the winner here is most certainly BrewDog.